‘Economists, said John Maynard Keynes, should think of themselves as humble specialists, on a par with dentists. But his advice has gone unheeded. Over the past 50 years, economics and its jargon have penetrated every corner of human life. Decisions to marry and inject heroin alike are explained in terms of utility maximisation. Doctors, priests and scientists are lumped together as service providers or rent seekers. Schoolteachers are urged to “add value” to their pupils. The pig philosophy, as Thomas Carlyle called it, has become all-embracing.

Of the many harms inflicted by economics on the English language, “human capital” is the most grievous. Coined by Chicago economists Jacob Mincer and Gary Becker in the 1960s, it refers to the stock of personal skills and qualities that constitutes a worker’s economic value. Such skills and qualities are often costly to acquire and yield returns only over a long period of time, so are readily thought of as a kind of capital. Mincer and Becker’s work has provided the intellectual rationale for the huge expansion of higher education in recent decades. In an economy dominated by the knowledge and service industries, with personality and expertise at a premium, “investment in human capital” is the name of the game.

The phrase “human capital” is now so thoroughly naturalised that we seldom pause to ponder its implications. What is capital anyway? Capital is not a particular kind of good, but any good viewed in relation to certain interests. A donkey is capital to the wood-carrier. A derelict church is capital to the restaurant entrepreneur. Capital, in short, is wealth viewed not as an end in itself but as a means to more wealth. The phrase “human capital” insinuates that human beings too are to be viewed in this light—as instruments of the productive process. We have all of us attained the status which Aristotle reserved for slaves, that of living tools. What a triumph for the dismal science! Keynes naively supposed that economic growth was for the sake of personal cultivation. His modern successors have put him right: personal cultivation is for the sake of economic growth.’

Brilliant. ‘Human capital’ shall not pass my lips again.

Neither will it cross my lips (I hope).

So are your employees assets? Capital? Furniture?
Are they only a means to an end? That end being making a profit for your shareholders... for you?

How you view your employees will determine how well they perform for you and how difficult a new implementation will be. If they feel valued and taken into account they will take ownership of the work and the new tools you are providing for them. If it is mobile technology... how will it help them? Will it improve their workflow? Their work-life balance?

If we see them as assets they will only perform to their stated specifications. If we see them as collaborators in our success they will give more... much more.

As more companies embrace social media, the chatter about return on investment, or ROI, has amplified as executives attempt to determine whether the money they’re spending is worth it. In theory, it’s a good exercise but given it is still early days for social media, it is a challenge to accurately quantity its impact right now.

Rather than focus on ROI, companies should be looking long and hard at SMO – social media optimization.

So, what is SMO? One way to define is that SMO is a focus on making sure that a company’s social media activities are as efficient and effective as possible. It means creating content – be it blog posts, tweets, videos or Facebook updates – that can be easily used and leveraged across multiple social media platforms.

It means making sure a company’s social media person or team is highly productive so that their day-day-day activities are focused and productive as opposed to having a scattered shot-gun approach that consumes too many cycles.

Yes... and no.
I agree 100% that our work needs to be optimized. Social Media is no exception to anything else that is done in an organization and as such is not exempt of falling prey to waste and inefficient processes. There are multiple tools that can help improve this. But beyond the tools we must first look at how we are organized/structured. Does our organization's design aid or hamper our productivity?

We talk so much about relationships in social media that we forget about our internal structure and relationships.

Where do I disagree? There are still ways of measuring of ROI. Everything can be measured... everything can be tracked. It's just a matter of how we do it and how we interpret that data.

Over the past decade, open innovation has begun transforming the way global companies develop new products, as executives increasingly recognize the benefits of exposing internal R&D to outside ideas. Now, some organizations are going even further by applying open-source thinking to improve a range of core business processes. Aided by rapidly changing technology, these leaders are looking outside the gates to develop faster and better solutions to a variety of strategic, operational, and organizational problems.

Such companies have resorted to a practice called knowledge brokering, a systematic approach to seeking external ideas from people in a variety of industries, disciplines, and contexts and then of combining the resulting lessons in new ways. Most of these people are happy to share their experiences free of charge. Like best-practice benchmarking, knowledge brokering aims to find—not invent—world-class answers to problems. But it goes beyond benchmarking and other traditional approaches of where and how companies search for information and how they use it. A closer look at the way forward-looking organizations use knowledge brokering to improve their business processes offers practical lessons for companies of all stripes and suggests how senior managers must adapt to thrive in a digital era characterized by increased collaboration.

Although fascinating may be a strong word I am still going to use it. This is fascinating! Remember when we had walls? Great big walls 'hiding' our organizations?

This whole concept of becoming 'open' and utilizing 'knowledge brokering' would have seemed a crazy idea 10 years ago. Today it is not a crazy idea ... if you don't open up, become more transparent and seek external opinions you may be left behind.

More and more it will be less and less about what is hidden from customers and the public. Instead, the winners will be those who act (and implement well) the knowledge that is gathered from all sources - both internal and external.

Fascinating!